This invention relates in general to digital image collections, and more particularly, to identifying popular landmarks in large digital image collections.
With the increased use of digital images, increased capacity and availability of digital storage media, and the interconnectivity offered by digital transmission media such as the Internet, ever larger corpora of digital images are accessible to an increasing number of people. Persons having a range of interests from various locations spread throughout the world take photographs of various subjects and can make those photographs available, for instance, on the Internet. For example, digital photographs of various landmarks and tourist sites from across the world may be taken by persons with different levels of skill in taking photographs and posted on the web. The photographs may show the same landmark from different perspectives, and taken from the same or different distances.
To leverage the information contained in these large corpora of digital images, it is necessary that the corpora be organized. For example, at digital image web sites such as Google Photos or Picasa, starting at a high level menu, one may drill down to a detailed listing of subjects for which photographs are available. Alternatively, one may be able to search one or more sites that have digital photographs. Some tourist information websites, for example, have downloaded images of landmarks associated with published lists of popular tourist sites.
However, there is no known system that can automatically extract information such as the most popular tourist destinations from these large collections. As numerous new photographs are added to these digital image collections, it may not be feasible for users to manually label the photographs in a complete and consistent manner that will increase the usefulness of those digital image collections. What is needed therefore, are systems and methods that can automatically identify and label popular landmarks in large digital image collections.